The team of Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) and Serbian firm Bureau Cube Partners of Serbia has won an anonymous design competition for the new Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade.
Working from the 1880s to the early 1900s, the inventor and engineer Nikola Tesla made groundbreaking contributions to electrical engineering and technology including the development of alternating current electricity, the Tesla coil, early advancements in wireless communication, and concepts that laid the groundwork for radio and radar technology.
He was born into a Serbian family in what is now Croatia in the Austrian Empire, and is buried in Belgrade’s existing Nikola Tesla Museum.
The new museum is one of four earmarked for the city’s planned new museum quarter.
It will be built in the historic Milan Vapa Paper Mill, which opened in 1924 as the nation’s first modern factory, and which has been abandoned for the past decade.
Its renovation is funded by state development agency, Belgrade Waterfront, which organised the design competition.
ZHA said the museum’s design draws on Tesla’s research into magnetic fields and wireless energy transfer. It incorporates dynamic elliptical curves radiating from the old factory chimney, the site’s dominant feature.
“A new circular opening in the factory’s western façade will be the public entrance leading visitors to the triple-height central atrium anchored by the historic chimney at the heart of the 13,400 square metre museum,” ZHA said.
The museum’s first floor galleries incorporate historical artefacts and interactive displays, and a 12-million-volt transformer.
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